Quotes About Perception

It's all in your mind" is almost insulting, implying there's something strange or weak about you or that the symptoms are in your imagination. This is most unfortunate, since the symptoms are very real, the result of a very physical process.

The whole notion of what is black and what is Southern is a thorny issue, to say the least.

Where does black food (Dunbar food, to use Ishmael Reed's term, which I prefer to 'soul food') stop and Southern food begin, or vice versa?

The moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life.

How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. (What's Wrong with the World)

the fact that the visual experience before me was exactly the same as it has been for sixteen years.

What does it say that you look like some sort of nut job when you turn your phone off?

Described Washington as a community of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state… In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role…

Philosophers, Wittgenstein said, had made the mistake of being like scientists chasing the meaning behind things – truth, mind, time, justice, reality – when none of this really matters, or is even achievable. A philosopher might waste his time wondering how he knew the child with the cut knee screaming her head off was really in pain, while the mother would rush in with comfort and bandages. The philosopher was clearly the one with lessons to learn.

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

She breathes all the political gases that flow around this, but she never seems to inhale them.

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel. I can feel. No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine. It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.